Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy

By Steven A. Epstein

In this highly original work, Steven A. Epstein shows that the ways Italians employ words and think about race and labor are profoundly affected by the language used in medieval Italy to sustain a system of slavery. The author's findings about the surprising persistence of the "language of slavery" demonstrate the difficulty of escaping the legacy of a shameful past.

For Epstein, language is crucial to understanding slavery, for it preserves the hidden conditions of that institution. He begins his book by discussing the words used to conduct and describe slavery in Italy, from pertinent definitions given in early dictionaries, to the naming of slaves by their masters, to the ways in which bondage has been depicted by Italian writers from Dante to Primo Levi and Antonio Gramsci. Epstein then probes Italian legal history, tracing the evolution of contracts for buying, selling, renting, and freeing people. Next he considers the behaviors of slaves and slave owners as a means of exploring how concepts of liberty and morality changed over time. He concludes by analyzing the language of the market, where medieval Italians used words to fix the prices of people they bought and sold.

The first history of slavery in Italy ever published, Epstein's work has important implications for other societies, particularly America's. "For too long," Epstein notes, "Americans have studied their own slavery as it if were the only one ever to have existed, as if it were the archetype of all others." His book allows citizens of the United States and other former slave-holding nations a richer understanding of their past and present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781501725142

Steven A. Epstein

Steven A. Epstein is professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His books include Wage Labor and Guilds in Medieval Europe and Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy.

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PROLOGUE

Ciao! This familiar greeting and salutation derives from the expression (vostro) schiavo, (your) slave. Probably first used in Venice, the word recalls the elaborate courtesies of past centuries, when refined people spoke as though they were slaves or servants, without irony or comradely solidarity with their inferiors. And yet, why a slave? Why would a free person want to be a slave in any context? The meaning of this type of reversal is hard to recover, but a small problem of etymology in Italian prompts larger questions about slavery.

How the language of Italian slavery began and endured is the subject of this book. Since the book is not a narrative or chronological study of Italian slavery, the reader might benefit from some general remarks about the basic story, before and after the medieval experience of slavery in Italy, the main subject here. When Italy was the center of the Roman Empire, a high percentage of the peninsula’s population consisted of slaves. The Roman state was a genuine slave culture, and bequeathed to posterity a sophisticated legal tradition on slavery as well as habits of expression in Latin that eventually shaped the Italian dialects. In the early Middle Ages the Roman slave culture collapsed, even in the Byzantine-held areas of southern Italy, and was replaced by other cultures that owned some slaves-the Lombard states in the north and center of the peninsula, and Sicily under Muslim rule. Why the Roman slave culture gave way to a culture with slaves is a complex issue, but the answer must depend on the state’s power to maintain slavery, and the market’s ability to supply slaves. Slavery always rested on violence, and the Roman Empire was simply more effective than its successors in Italy in providing an experienced mix of force and incentives to sustain an economic system with many slaves. The habit of owning slaves continued in the early Middle Ages, and the old legal and moral arguments for the legitimacy of slavery remained convincing at least to the owners. Early medieval Italy attracted merchants who brought people from the Balkans, Sardinia, and across the Alps who replenished the stock of slaves. Rural slaves gradually became peasants, more efficiently exploitable and likely to produce more peasants, at no capital expense to the masters. A continuous if low-level slavery continued in Italy up to the first documents around the year 1000 that illuminate medieval slavery.

In the central Middle Ages, 1000-1350, slaves became more common as possessions and items of commerce in the northern maritime states of Venice and Genoa, and also appeared in the territories the Normans took from the Byzantines, Lombards, and Muslims in the south. This revived slavery probably resulted from increased military and commercial interactions with the Muslim world, which brought Italians more wealth and new sources of and markets for slaves. Slaves were still rare in some parts of Italy, like Rome itself or the Po valley. They seem to have been more numerous in the ports having external sources of supply, and in the newly conquered Muslim and Byzantine lands, where some of the local population was already enslaved. Estimates of population are educated guesses in these centuries, but slaves probably comprised no more than a percent or two of the population in the northern ports in the thirteenth century, and a little higher percentage in Sicily. Yet these small numbers should not obscure the startling fact that slavery had revived and found a place in Italian society and law, just as it was disappearing for good in much of Europe. The chronology of slavery reveals the choices Italians made about whether or not to practice slavery. Why is there slavery? Why is there not slavery? These are important questions to ask in every phase of slavery’s history.

After the devastating plague of 1348, slaves became more expensive but also more useful in a world of labor shortages. In the fifteenth century Genoese slaves were perhaps 4 to 5 percent of the population, a figure matched by some areas of the south. In Renaissance Florence there were only a few hundred expensive slaves, all women working in domestic service. The increasing prices of slaves explain why they were more numerous at the points where they entered Italy, the ports and the Mezzogiorno, and rarer in the interior. As slavery became increasingly a luxury in the north, the slave population consisted increasingly of women from distant lands in eastern Europe and Africa. Slavery began to wane in Italy in the sixteenth century except on the galleys, where male slavery experienced a second wind as slaves, mostly captured North Africans and convicts, replaced the free men who were no longer as willing to row for their cities against the formidable Ottoman Empire. These slaves were mostly destined to be quickly exterminated by the exhausting work of rowing or by the diseases rife on the galleys. Free servants working for low wages largely replaced expensive slave women in the houses of the wealthy, and international supplies of slaves flowed toward the New World. Plantation-style agriculture never established itself in Italy, and slavery could not be made to pay in farming or even in the galleys. By the late eighteenth century slavery had virtually disappeared in Italy, and the few relics of it were swept away in the disorders and refonns of the revolutionary era. The gradual withering away of slavery must be attributed to either the high prices of slaves or an aversion to purchasing the kinds of slaves available in the early modern, increasingly global economy.

By 1871 Italy was a unified country, and soon its belated search for colonies took Italians to Libya, Eritrea, and Benadir (Somalia), where they found traditional slave regimes as yet unaffected by western European attitudes against slavery, and so Italians resolved to impose enlightened practices on their colonial peoples. The Antislavery Society of Italy fonned to combat slavery in the world and in Italy’s own colonies. During World War II many thousands of Italians eventually found themselves as forced laborers, de facto slaves of the Reich, and thousands ofItalianJews became slaves exterminated through labor. All these subsequent episodes of slavery bear the traces of the medieval Italian experiences with the institution.

Although Italy has been a fully realized country for only a little more than a century, the Italian sense of cultural identity has existed since Roman times. In this book I write about Italians where appropriate, and the Genoese, Pisans, Florentines, Sicilians, and all the rest of the strong local identities where necessary. Since this book focuses on the language of slavery—mainly Italian, but also Latin and the dialects—I have tried to be careful about not using Italian anachronistically. I do believe the seas and mountains have given the peninsula and islands a cultural, legal, and social unity or experience, even as rivalries and bitter wars frequently overwhelmed the sense of common identity.

Let me conclude this prologue with a quotation that helps to explain why the history of Italian slavery repays an extended study. In 1498 Cristoforo Colombo wrote back to his patrons in Spain, Ferdinando and Isabella. He described the island of Hispaniola as capable of exporting four thousand slaves a year.¹ I have always been puzzled by this unusual skill Columbus possessed-how and where did he learn to size up an island so that he could estimate the number of slaves it could yield in a year? Centuries of Genoese experience with the realities of the slave trade could produce this kind of expertise. But Columbus knew more than island demographics. He went on to observe that even if these slaves died in the crossing to Europe, it would not always be this way. For the blacks and Canary Islanders also died at first, and he implies that once the routine of the transit was established, the death rate of what would become the Middle Passage would fall. It is intriguing to see Columbus contemplate the use of these slaves in Europe, and already in his time thousands of African slaves were working in Portugal itself. At one level this book is an extended effort to understand the broadest possible context that created Columbus and his way of seeing and describing the people of Hispaniola.

A study of Italian slavery accomplishes two important tasks. The European background to New World slavery matters, and the story of Columbus reveals that there is a vital Italian component to that heritage. The practice of slavery in Italy, from the Roman slave culture down to the late medieval Genoa that formed the sensibilities of Columbus, shaped habits of mind and language that reverberated through the centuries and live on in the ways Italians use language today.

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1. Cristobal Colon: Textos y documentos campletos, ed. Consuela Varela and Juan Gil (Madrid, 1992), pp. 407-8.

INTRODUCTION

This book concerns the language of Italian slavery and how its changes over time reveal larger shifts in how Italians thought about people, property, ethnicity, and work. The theme is twofold. The history of slavery in Italy, largely a medieval story, provides a rich context for exploring the connections between a social institution and the language so necessary to perpetuate it. Second, historians need to remember that they study words, language in a context. La schiavità in Italian exists in a historical setting only slightly influenced by the English language and experience. The meaning of the Italian experience with slavery can provide important fresh perspectives on this fundamental, global human institution.

Medieval and modern Italian slavery is the subject of this book, but I want to introduce this study by exploring why this slavery was and is important to the Italian understanding of race, and how it still matters to Italians today, even though they do not always think so. The connections in Italy between slavery and attitudes toward ethnicity and race are complex. We need to put aside modern ideas on race and look instead at skin colors and ethnic labels as two signifiers about a person. Can one be black and Italian, white and African? For our people, the answers are Yes. But ethnic hostility is not quite the same as racism, though the two certainly at times overlap. Genoese attitudes in the Middle Ages about Lombards reflect ethnic tensions; their opinions of black Africans reveal a deeper aversion based on ideas about color that we will explore in more detail in Chapter 1. One of this book’s purposes is to explain how slavery and racism changed over time. To make sense of how the story unfolds, we need to understand too that slavery and racism are not the same things and can easily exist apart. Of course they may also reinforce one another. Slavery became an entrenched way of life in parts of Italy before, but not long before, the first solid evidence for racism appears. Hostile attitudes toward people viewed as others, on the grounds of color, religion, or ethnicity, also became entrenched ways of thinking among Italians and fostered the practice of slavery. When slavery began to wane, the racism remained and caught its second wind, as we will shortly see, when some nineteenth-century historians and social scientists modernized racism at the same time as they rediscovered their own traditions of slavery. Just as slavery and racism affected the ways Italians used language, the endurance of racism shows another of slavery’s legacies to Italian culture. Slavery is rightly understood primarily as a system of labor, and its main ideology might simply be efficiency or necessity. Racism became another powerful means to justify slavery in the Middle Ages precisely because it helped to excuse practices that occasionally raised ethical worries in the most calloused souls.

My other purpose in writing this book is to use medieval history in a new way. The fact is that medieval history appears increasingly distant and remote from contemporary concerns, and in many historical issues people’s eyes glaze over when they begin to hear about the medieval origins of anything. What I propose to do here is show that the language used centuries ago to sustain a relatively unknown system of slavery still has profound effects on the ways Italians use language and think about race today. So I’m going to accept the challenge medievalists must face and make diachronic, even polychronic connections between what I study and what is happening today, and not simply leave it to other specialists to fill in the gaps. I am not a medievalist depreciating my field of study, and I do think that a medieval perspective on contemporary issues like labor and race can yield useful results.

I have one other aim, which I hope will be congenial to a wider audience. It may seem that a history of Italian slavery that depends on a close study of the Italian language would best be undertaken by an Italian scholar raised in the language and culture. And yet the perspective of an outsider may yield some new insights the Italians have not yet observed. For far too long Americans have studied their own slavery as if it were the only one ever to have existed, as if it were the archetype of all others. This is a typical argument for American exceptionalism, and I think a wider view of slaveries across the globe will help place the American variant in its proper context, as well as provide ample grounds for exploring the neglected field of slavery in Italy. The Italian audience for this book may find that the outsider’s perspective provides a broader context for this sad part of their own history. The wider audience may find that the pivotal role Italy played in Western history in so many fields needs to be extended to yet another: the story of slavery.

I need to begin by making a preliminary case that the broader context provided by medieval history helps us to make sense of the long and complicated story of slavery in Italy. This point struck me with particular force when I was in Genoa in the autumn of 1998 and read in the local newspaper Il secolo XIX a story about Nigerian prostitutes being sold in Genoa. The newspaper reported on 30 October that the local police had discovered a market in black slaves. Young girls arrived in Europe at Paris and then came to Genoa to be sold like animals. These African Venuses, as the paper described them, were auctioned off at prices between eighteen and fifty million lire (between ten and thirty thousand dollars), depending on their age and beauty. Their new owners then put them to work as prostitutes in northern Italy, and kept them in line through beatings and black magic. By 30 October the police had managed to arrest only the Nigerian members of the ring.

And beyond the drama of this slavery episode, there is a gray zone in which actual slavery merges into more ambiguous styles of exploitation. Anyone who flies to Italy off season is likely to see that a large number of the fellow passengers will consist of Peruvians or Filipinos or others being brought into Italy to work as domestic servants and in other labor-intensive capacities. Italy is by no means alone in this type of exploitation of or provision of economic opportunity (depending on your point of view) for the less wealthy peoples of the world. A very low birth rate (actually below replacement) creates eery parallels to the situation in plague-stricken fifteenth-century Italy. Slavery is of course now illegal, but labor shortages are not. The latest style of colonization conveniently ignores Africans, and no longer goes out and conquers land somewhere out there, but instead brings the currently most valuable resource, the humans, back home and leaves the troubles of ruling places like Peru or the Philippines to someone else. Slavery may be mostly gone, but the habit of privileging some ethnic groups over others, forged during slavery, endures. And how these latest in a long series of newcomers are to be absorbed or not into the Italian people is anyone’s guess. But other innocent people in modern Italy also have experienced the condition of slavery, and their stories also reflect deep roots in language and culture.

One of the most famous and articulate of these innocents was of course Primo Levi (1919–1987), who certainly knew what it meant to be a slave, admittedly in a system the Italians neither invented nor adopted in their own country. At the beginning of his time in Auschwitz, a fellow prisoner offered Levi some advice, which he did not completely accept. But part of the advice must have seemed true: that we are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every offense, destined to a death more or less certain, but there is a power that remains to us, and we ought to defend it with all vigor because it is the last: the power of refusing our consent.¹ At the start of the next section of his memoirs, slavery remained on Levi’s mind, for he saw to the heart of slavery: slaves and masters, the masters themselves slaves; fear moves the one and hatred the other, all other powers silent. All are enemies or rivals to each other.² Levi knew that he was a slave at the Buna synthetic rubber works because of the lucky accident that he was trained as a chemist. His useful skill helped to spare him the fate of the majority of prisoners being quickly worked to death. Many years later, in 1986, when Levi published The Drowned and the Saved, his last reflections on his life, he was still convinced that the work in the camps, besides its murderous purposes, was pure and simple slavery. Haunted in his last years by the fear of new holocausts and the possibility that the world of the camps might return, he asked, how much of the world of the concentration camps is dead and will not return again, like slavery and the code of duels?³ Many thousands of Italians—Jews and gentiles—experienced deportations, forced labor, and worse during World War II. For Levi of course the distinguishing feature of his experience as a slave was that it was intended to kill him and yet he survived. Unlike Levi, most slaves in previous centuries could believe that their value to the masters would preserve them, but for a time in Europe in the 1940s human life was so cheap that this assumption ceased to apply.

What did Levi mean when he feared the return of the camps yet also thought that slavery itself was as dead as the duel? Perhaps he considered the buying or selling or renting of slaves, a feature of the Third Reich (which did rent its slaves to German industry) to be now inconceivable, but that the ethnic and religious hatreds making the extermination of the other a plausible policy remained a threat in modem Europe. Certainly the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in the 1990s proves that Levi was right to be afraid of the world of the camps returning, but the buying and selling of human beings remains illegal in Italy and the rest of Europe, though as we have seen, it is still occurring. Levi was typical of people in Italy and elsewhere who feel that truly the last nail has been hammered into slavery’s coffin and it is gone for good. Maybe Levi believed that too, but we should take a little of his fear, and our own perspective, and ask whether this is the last, or one of a series of the deaths of slavery? We must respect Levi’s perspective on his own enslavement, and use it to explore the vicissitudes of slavery. Also, it must serve as a warning that the privileging of one group over another always carries with it the possibility of forced labor without compensation. Whether this is slavery or not is in some ways a technicality.

The best way to demonstrate the validity of a polychronic approach to the ways Italians have spoken about slavery is to start with some other recent contexts. Encouraged by the spirit of reform in the papacy of Leo XIII, some Italians established in 1888 an organization, like similar ones in England and France, to combat the by now stereotypical evils of slavery. The Italian Antislavery Society held its first national congress in Rome on 22–24 April 1903.⁴ On the first day of the conference, as is so often the case with these events, the organizers had planned a local excursion they thought was relevant to the theme of their meeting. The conferees went on a tour of the catacombs, certainly one of Rome’s many impressive places to see, but not one that is obviously tied to antislavery activities. But in the catacombs the official record stated that they saw evidence recording the abolition of slavery, accomplished by the brotherhood and charity of Christians, from the very beginnings of the new society, in which free and slave were all considered as sons of the same Heavenly Father.⁵ There was of course no such evidence, and even though the society later put up an inscription praising Constantine the Great as an opponent of slavery, some members must have understood that in fact slavery continued on in late antiquity under the Christian emperors pretty much as it had before. This point of historical accuracy is not the issue here. What is important to observe is that these good people—and I think they were mainly that—in 1903 were inspired by the idea that they were carrying on the traditions of the early church, as they understood the language of history. As erroneous as they may have been on these matters, these words encouraged them to do good works. Or, they found it necessary to clothe their antislavery activities in a suitable historical framework, and they did not find, or perhaps even look for, significant assaults on slavery in Italy between their own time and Constantine’s. We will see the same myth-making at work, with good and bad consequences, in the ways medieval people, by using language, tried to understand and shape what we call the economy. But for the Antislavery Society of Italy there was an immense gulf of historical amnesia between the kindly acts of Constantine and the origins of their own antislavery work, encouraged by the eloquent, formal condemnation of slavery by Pope Leo XIII in his bull In plurimis of 1888.

Let us consider another recent context in which the polychronic context of slavery and language is even more explicit, and where an archeological approach to language use will enable us to see how the Italian understanding of slavery changed over time. Salvatore Bongi published an article in 1866 revealing that thousands of Mongol or Tartar slaves had been imported into Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. According to Bongi, Italians had largely forgotten this historical fact, and his survey of the documents reveals genuine surprise at his discovery. Bongi believed that this slavery was important for understanding the history of Italian customs, yet it remained buried up to recent times in the dust of old contracts, unobserved in statutes and in the more neglected volumes of canonists and jurists.⁶ Bongi thought that slavery had never been formally abolishe’d in the republics of Genoa, Venice, and Lucca, and in his view it was perhaps better that it had disappeared through changes in customs and manners rather than legal decrees. He concluded his essay by observing that at least Italian slavery had never reached the proportions of the American variety, which produced a "mournful pilgrimage of the black race (gente nera) to America, an occasion for much weeping by the unfortunate race (stirpe) and much misfortune to their owners"—recently defeated, as Bongi knew, in civil war.⁷ The significance of Bongi’s research was that he rediscovered a slavery that had been forgotten.

A contemporary Italian scholar was also turning his attention to ethnicity in Italy. Cesare Lombroso (1836–1909) was not so much interested in slavery as in his favorite subjects: crime, anthropology, race, the law, and punishment. Lombroso was rethinking racism for Italians just as scholars were looking for new ways to write about slavery. It is worth our time to visit the intellectual world in which slavery was rediscovered. The human face was for Lombroso the key for understanding modem ideas of race. The science of physiognomy had deep roots in a culture whose people were accustomed to believe that the face was indeed the mirror of the soul, and much more. Stephen Jay Gould points out that Lombroso needed crime to be a natural, inherited trait, though he was not without humanity and he eventually considered criminality to be a mental illness that needed to be treated.⁸ But Lombroso’s search for the biological origins of crime was so intense that it took him deep into the animal and plant kingdoms, where he found murderous plants and thieving insects enough to prove to his satisfaction that crime was a universal, natural phenomenon. For Italians, Lombroso found that the criminal face had a larger and longer nose, bigger lips, more cavities, predominantly black hair, and a slight or nonexistent beard.⁹ The zany research that produced these results is not our concern here, though it did allow Lombroso to make connections like this one: The greater frequency of homicides in Calabria, Sicily, and Sardinia is fundamentally owed to the African and eastern elements in the population.¹⁰ Here we see that Lombroso was well aware of the medieval slaves who carried this blood into Italy. This type of research also fostered northern Italian feelings of superiority over their southern neighbors, and provided simple answers to complex questions. And of course, what could be done about the African blood down there in Calabria? Nothing at all.

In another work Lombroso expressed himself more forcefully on race—in his The White Man and the Man of Color, published in 1871. Here are two revealing quotations from the master.

It’s a question of knowing if we whites, who haughtily tower over the summit of civilization, ought one day to bow down before the prognathous muzzle of the black, and the yellow, and to the frightful face of the Mongol; if, in the end, we owe our primacy to our biological organism or to the accidents of chance. And it would be a good twist to decide it, if we can, without fear, without shameless audacity, by being concerned more than with tradition, but with the sole authority of our time—Science."¹¹

All this within twelve years of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Lombroso is asking if the dominance of the white race results from chance or the struggle for the survival of the fittest. For if it were by chance, the Mongols would have their day. Two hundred pages later he offers this startling conclusion.

Only we whites have achieved the most perfect symmetry in the forms of the body. Only we whites, with alphabetical writing and inflected languages, furnishing thought with a more ample and comfortable garb, are able to spread and eternalize thought in monuments, in books, and in the press. Only we whites possess a true musical art. Only we whites, through the mouth of Christ and Buddha, have proclaimed the freedom of the slave, the right of man to life, respect for the aged, for women, and for the sick, and the forgiveness of enemies. Only we whites, with Washington, Franklin, and Mirabeau, have proclaimed and put into effect the true concept of nationality. Only we whites, in the end, with Luther, Galileo, Epicurus, Spinoza, Lucretius, and Voltaire, have procured the liberty of thought, of which you, gentle hearers, offer an example, helping, without disgust, to develop some themes so unorthodox!"¹²

A bravura ending, and heady advice to an Italian people on the verge of assuming their share of the white man’s burden in Africa.

Lombroso was interested in race long before he latched onto criminality. From his perch at the University of Pavia, he quickly absorbed and repackaged the latest scientific thought for his fellow Italians, so recently themselves discovering in their new country the true spirit of nationality. Lombroso was a good liberal reformer who intended to use all the fruits of modem science to benefit society. And examine his construction of white identity for an Italian audience as he assembles an incongruous group with Buddha, Spinoza, Mirabeau, and only one Italian, Galileo, to engross all of humanity’s accomplishments for we whites—and shows his grasp of the latest Aryan thinking by getting ahold of Buddha for his we. The real tragic irony of this is that Lombroso was constructing a white racial identity for an ethnic group of Europeans whose own traditions were more tolerant and less xenophobic than most others. And yet to be modern and scientific, Italians had to join up with the rest of the whites. Italians wanted to be just as white as their northern neighbors. This new interest in color, with deep roots in the Middle Ages, would soon be joined to the study of slavery.

Ridolfo Livi (1856–1920) was an anthropologist active in establishing the new social sciences in